Markdown

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Introduction

Markdown is a text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers. Markdown
allows you to write using an easy-to-read, easy-to-write plain text
format, then convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML).

Thus, “Markdown” is two things: (1) a plain text formatting syntax;
and (2) a software tool, written in Perl, that converts the plain text
formatting to HTML. See the Syntax page for details pertaining to
Markdown’s formatting syntax. You can try it out, right now, using the
online Dingus.

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make
it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted
document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking
like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While
Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML
filters, the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s
syntax is the format of plain text email.

(You can use this ‘.text’ suffix trick to view the Markdown source for
the content of each of the pages in this section, e.g. the
Syntax and License pages.)

Markdown is free software, available under a BSD-style open source
license. See the License page for more information.

Discussion List

I’ve set up a public mailing list for discussion about Markdown.
Any topic related to Markdown — both its formatting syntax and
its software — is fair game for discussion. Anyone who is interested
is welcome to join.

It’s my hope that the mailing list will lead to good ideas for future
improvements to Markdown.

Installation and Requirements

Movable Type

Markdown works with Movable Type version 2.6 or later (including
Movable Type 3.0).

Copy the “Markdown.pl” file into your Movable Type “plugins”
directory. The “plugins” directory should be in the same directory
as “mt.cgi”; if the “plugins” directory doesn’t already exist, use
your FTP program to create it. Your installation should look like
this:

(mt home)/plugins/Markdown.pl

Once installed, Markdown will appear as an option in Movable Type’s
Text Formatting pop-up menu. This is selectable on a per-post basis:

Markdown translates your posts to HTML when you publish; the posts
themselves are stored in your MT database in Markdown format.

If you also install SmartyPants 1.5 (or later), Markdown will
offer a second text formatting option: “Markdown With
SmartyPants”. This option is the same as the regular “Markdown”
formatter, except that it automatically uses SmartyPants to create
typographically correct curly quotes, em-dashes, and ellipses. See
the SmartyPants web page for more information.

To make Markdown (or “Markdown With SmartyPants”) your default
text formatting option for new posts, go to Weblog Config:
Preferences.

Blosxom

Copy the “Markdown” plug-in file to your Blosxom plug-ins folder.
If you’re not sure where your Blosxom plug-ins folder is, see the
Blosxom documentation for information.

That’s it. The entries in your weblog will now automatically be
processed by Markdown.

If you’d like to apply Markdown formatting only to certain
posts, rather than all of them, Markdown can optionally be used in
conjunction with Blosxom’s Meta plug-in. First, install the
Meta plug-in. Next, open the Markdown plug-in file in a text
editor, and set the configuration variable $g_blosxom_use_meta
to 1. Then, simply include a “meta-markup: Markdown” header line
at the top of each post you compose using Markdown.

BBEdit

Markdown works with BBEdit 6.1 or later on Mac OS X. It also works
with BBEdit 5.1 or later and MacPerl 5.6.1 on Mac OS 8.6 or later. If
you’re running Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar), you may need to install the
Perl module Digest::MD5 from CPAN; Digest::MD5 comes
pre-installed on Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther).

Copy the “Markdown.pl” file to appropriate filters folder in your
“BBEdit Support” folder. On Mac OS X, this should be:

BBEdit Support/Unix Support/Unix Filters/

See the BBEdit documentation for more details on the location of
these folders.

You can rename “Markdown.pl” to whatever you wish.

That’s it. To use Markdown, select some text in a BBEdit document,
then choose Markdown from the Filters sub-menu in the “#!” menu, or
the Filters floating palette

Command-Line

Use the --html4tags command-line switch to produce HTML output from a
Unix-style command line. E.g.:

% perl Markdown.pl --html4tags foo.text

Type perldoc Markdown.pl, or read the POD documentation within the
Markdown.pl source code for more information.

Acknowledgements

Aaron Swartz deserves a tremendous amount of credit for his feedback on the
design of Markdown’s formatting syntax. Markdown is much better thanks
to Aaron’s ideas, feedback, and testing. Also, Aaron’s html2text
is a very handy (and free) utility for turning HTML into
Markdown-formatted plain text.